Energy-balanced clustering routing protocol based on task separation in wireless sensor networks

Clustering protocol for data gathering is one of the effective ways to solve the energy hole problem in wireless sensor networks. However, most of the existing clustering protocols focus on the network model with uniform node distribution. They cannot effectively apply to the real network where the sensor nodes are randomly non-uniformly deployed. In this paper, we propose an energy-balanced clustering routing protocol (EBCRP) based on task separation. In this scheme, the network is firstly divided into clusters by using global information. And each of them has the same number of sensor nodes in order to balance the energy consumption of intra-cluster. In succession, task separation, the tasks of traditional single cluster head are separated and achieved by two cluster heads respectively, is proposed to reduce the traffic burden for single cluster head. Then, we explore an energy-efficient and reliable inter-cluster routing algorithm, which considers comprehensively three factors: residual energy, distance and available buffer space of nodes. Simulation results and performance evaluation of EBCRP show significant improvement in network lifetime and energy balance.